Yes I am going to glom onto the recent Hive spike and make a #Leofinance post. However, I am going to do some research and try to shed light on valuable information.
The first big question on everyones mind is going to be is this growth organic? Or whale manipulation?
I sort of just assumed it was organic because of the lack of dipping. This is a logical fallacy though. Let's do some actual research.
Speaking of logical fallacies ... I've been seeing screenshots lately of the growth of accounts on Hive. THIS DOESN'T PROVE ANYTHING. People buy mass accounts. Whales can mint accounts with their Resource Credits. I don't have a problem with these things, but it's a fact we must consider. That account graph isn't great evidence either way.
A quick glance at the introduce yourself tag [https://peakd.com/created/introduceyourself] makes it look like there are tons of new accounts. I did some very basic detective work [and also just used common sense] and found that some of the account were for sure fake. [Also some of them were flagged for plagiarism already].
People who curate new accounts need to do a bit of research first. It's VERY easy to do a reverse image search. This might not prove the account is fake, but the Identity thief might have been lazy and used an image that has been used by other scammers and copied a lot. This is actually a lot more common than you might think. You might also find them lying about a persons location or some other obvious proof of Identity Theft.
There are other common sense techniques you can deploy. One account I found was a person trying to act like they were new to HIVE and crypto, but tagged their first post with #blocktrades and then made a post on #leofinance as their second post. It's POSSIBLE they used blocktrades before and they didn't know it was an important account ... and it's POSSIBLE they saw a friend use the leofinance tag, but the whole thing seemed sketchy and I'd personally avoid voting for that account.
The good news is there does seem to be an increase of new accounts, if you base it off people who actually show proof of identity. [The date and hive logo next to their face]. I RECOMMEND PEOPLE ONLY VOTE FOR PEOPLE PROVING THEIR IDENTITY. There are obvious scammers out there farming the #introduceyourself tag. Some blacklisting projects and individuals do their best to help, but from my minimal investigation it seems like I found fake accounts earning Hive. *The good news is there seems to be a clear increase in Verified HIVE accounts.
Next, I checked to see which exchange the spikes were coming from. When I searched by volume % Upbit was by far the highest [and also had a high price if you look under "price"]. When you look under HIVE on the Upbit market page, you can see a HIVE:KRW pairing and also you can see that https://upbit.com/home is Korean [and international].
Does this prove anything?
Not really.
There are some large Korean whales on HIVE. They are probably just buying up the token for whatever reason. Probably to stake.
It COULD be STEEM whales, playing some type of weird, long game manipulation.
It could also be Hive whales from any country who are just playing the [Korean] market to arbitrage trade.
It's difficult to prove if crypto spikes are "organic" or "manipulation". [And hard to define] there are good signs like the lack of dipping after spikes. Then again, some people play crazy long term games with cryptos [especially people who got large STEEM fortunes from sneak mining and then got lots of HIVE from the initial HIVE fork].
You can learn some things from the data about who is buying Hive. At least you can make hypotheses. For example, you can look at the new users and ask yourself would they be using Upbit? If the answer is no, it's probably whale purchases, even if lots of little accounts are buying the HIVE. This is basic logic.
This post should not be considered personal or financial advice.